Most websites glossed over this, but we didn't. Silverlight, once touted as Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash, has been retooled from its original purpose. Microsoft is betting big on HTML5 instead, turning Silverlight into the development platform for Windows Phone, and that's it. So... Silverlight is dead - long live Silerlight?

The only differentiating faeture of Silverlight that matters to users is when a user encounters a website that says "Silverlight required". Said user cannot participate in said website without running Windows and downloading Silverlight for that platform.

Microsoft specifically pushed Silverlight Smooth Streaming, which is the main benefit of Silverlight video streaming. That's the biggie. And it does not require Silverlight. Case closed.

The argument was whether or not Silverlight was using vendor lockin as a result of this push, and the conclusion is that it was not.

Even a requirement that web content is hosted on IIS is too strict a rquirement to be attractive to many.

It's perfectly possible for non-IIS servers to implement the technology, it does nothing particularly proprietary, it is a novel idea. Variable bitrate adaptation.

However, I think it was a problem of reach specifically regarding the varible bitrate adaptation (IIS only) and that is the only valid criticism against it. That however, is not the same as purposely trying to lock users into a single vendor.

If there was a way for users of any browser on any platform to acquire "IIS smooth streaming" for their browser client without necessarily having to be running Windows or x86 or x86_64, and without fear of being sued for it, then that would be acceptable and in line with the requirements of web standards.

Why would they be sued for it? Just wondering.

Since there is no way to do the latter, then IIS smooth streaming is unacceptable, and hence so is Silverlight.

This was never about your subjective definition of acceptable, it was about vendor lock in. Which there is no evidence of Silverlight explicitly doing so. Could they have been on more platforms? Yes. They got the biggies though. Windows, OSX, Linux, Symbian, Windows Phone.

Would they have done so with time? Absolutely. Silverlight, again I stress, is much more than video streaming.

I can do things in Silverlight that webprogrammers can really, only dream of doing in HTML5. The capability is just not there.